Low Page Speed scores and Slow Server Response Time after switching to Dreampress

#1

Hi,

I switched from VPS to Dreamhost after testing a clone of my main site and getting improved Page Speed scores and server response times. Also I got really quick load times on Pingdom Tools.

Now after 2 weeks my Pagespeed score has gone to crap (without me making any changes to my site) and my server load times are poor. I had 88/100 Pagespeed, now 72/100. My response time from Pingdom was 2s or under, now it’s 5-11s.

I’ve received very little support chat and I’m actually looking into switching hosts (I’ve been a customer since 2005).

Anyone have any ideas?

site - http://sparxtrading.com

Thanks
[hr]
I had an 88/100 Pagespeed before and ~ 2s load time from Pingdom

#2

How on earth did you get your page to load so fast?! From my perspective, it’s near instantaneous.

I see that you are using W3 Total Cache, what else did you do?

#3

Hi Tearstone,

I actually made some changes after I posted this thread. My scores are 72/100 without W3TC and load times are 5-7s vs under 2s.

I used to use WP Super Cache but it does NOT play well at all with Dreampress.

I used W3TC instead, it’s not supported by Dreamhost/Press but it works well in increasing my Pagespeed and load times.

#4

Did you use Disk:Enhanced/Disk or Opcode:Xcache? I keep getting errors using Opcode:Xcache.

#5

Disk enhanced

#6

Very impressive. I’m still scratching my head at why my site has a delay before the page loads. Thank you for sharing with me.

#7

What’s your site?

#8

The site is http://christian-gaming.com

#9

Oh I had the same problem as you “Leverage browser caching” and fixed it with some code in my htaccess file

#10

You wouldn’t happen to have that code handy would ya? :smiley:

#11

Let me know if it speeds stuff up!

Put this into your htaccess file!

EXPIRES CACHING

ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year" ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month" ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month" ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year" ExpiresByType font/x-woff "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access 1 year" ExpiresDefault "access 1 month" ## EXPIRES CACHING ##
#12

Whoaaa… careful with that. Some of the Expires headers you’re setting there (in particular, the “access 1 month” for text/html!) may cause browsers to cache all pages on your site for a very long time, preventing repeat visitors from seeing new content.

#13

Opps I thought when there’s new content the browser automatically knew changes and would show the current one!! Opps.

#14

Normally, yes. However, when an Expires header is present on a page (or any other resource), that tells the browser that it will not need to check for changes at all until the expiration date has been reached. In this case, it could potentially cause a browser to cache any page it visits on your site for up to one month, making updates to that page not appear.

Be very careful with Expires headers. While they can improve the performance of your site for repeat visitors, it’s very easy to accidentally end up putting yourself into a situation where visitors have old resources for your site cached for a very long time.

#15

Most modern browsers will only cache for 30 days anyway. If the user is active, visiting a lot of sites, the cached content will purge even faster. That said, I never set cache beyond 30 days.

<FilesMatch "\.(css|gif|htm|html|ico|jpg|js|png|rdf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000"
</FilesMatch>
#16

I removed that code from my htaccess file and nothing changed. Is it possible it’s disabled on Dreampress?

#17

Going along our earlier conversation Ken. Does your site speed changed based on if you are logged in or not?

#18

It used to be much slower while logged in but I no longer have that problem. Back when I was using a VPS I put in the code I listed here and that was the difference. Now after moving to Dreampress and doing some testing last night it seems that code is useless.

I also use Cloudflare as a CDN which helps speeds.

If you check my Pingdom Tools score now I boosted it even more last night by having Java load async!

#19

Back when I was on shared hosting, I used Cloudflare as well. I cannot say that I noticed any significant speed increase. I would be willing to give it a try again though.

How did you load java async? Is that done with the Page Speed module provided by Dreamhost?

#20

I did it through Cloudflare. It didn’t change my Pagespeed score but increased my load time a lot since my Java ads loaded async.